A reminder and a question before I step into storytelling mode for the weekend. First, don’t forget that I am collecting little known facts, interesting information and anything else that makes the Great Smoky Mountains such a wonderful place. For every fact you send, you’ll get one entry in the contest. Thanksgiving weekend I’ll randomly pick one name and that person will get a copy of the book “Scavenger Hike Adventures in the Great Smoky Mountains“. For example:
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the only major national park that has no admission fee. Many people lived here before it became a park and it was written into the charter that it will always be free to come into the park.
And my question: Fresh cranberries, canned berries or the jello-like cranberry flavored stuff?
Around 1900, logging concerns discovered the Smoky Mountains. During the next 30 years, they clearcut 67% of the future Park. Logging brought employment and hard currency to the mountaineers, but destroyed the environment. In the early 1920s the Park movement began. In Cades Cove, more than half the residents accepted the cash offered for their land while the others fought the Park movement. John W. Oliver, great-grandson of Cades Cove’s first settler, led the effort and his spirited fight against Tennessee’s state government ended in the State’s Supreme Court. A compromise allowed the Cove people to remain in their homes with a life-time lease, only one family still remains in the Cove.
Cranberry Sauce. If I have too.
Cranberry stuff right out of the can — we Filipinos know of nothing else (and are there turkeys in the Philippines?) But I’m also open to trying other people’s new fangled, gourmet concoctions… as long as they’ve made the whole Thanksgiving meal along with it 😉 (no, I don’t cook!)
Greenbrier has a trail that you can hike up to a ravine and see one of the old steam engines used during logging of the Smokies. The engine jumped track and went into the ravine and was unrecoverable.
I always get the canned cranberry that is kinda jello like. yummmmmmm
I don’t know a thing about the Smoky Mountains, but it sounds like a fun project. As for cranberries–I know I’m supposed to prefer fresh, but I love that jello-y stuff right out of a can. Sad but true.
I’m partial to cranberries right out of the can … like on Mad About You when he describes the slugh-slurp sound it makes as it comes out of the cam … it’s a comfort sound.
Jeni likes real cranberry sauce.